Discord Rising
by Valieara
Summary: Her name had doomed her. Hermione in relation to friendship, and the differences between the muggle and wizarding worlds. A bit darkish.


_**Disclaimer:** I own nothing._

_**Spoilers/Setting: **Up to_ Order of the Phoenix_; bookverse canon._

_**Notes: **At the bottom._

* * *

Hermione was born from power. 

Her father was convinced of it. He maintained that his wife had been through too much classical schooling. Her name was Helen. She had named her daughter Hermione. It was a little joke not many would understand; and a singular name for a singular girl.

Her name had doomed her.

She was different, something that at this point was incontrovertible. _A rose by any other name would smell as sweet_, saith Shakespeare; his own Hermione shivering in a castle through a winter's tale, dead and resurrected by its conclusion. A name is but a name. No mythological veneers; no imaginary ties through time and space; a _tabula rasa_ despite its associations with deities or mortals, or personalities famous or infamous.

His daughter had always been different. It was proven the day an owl flew down their chimney bearing a letter from another reality for his eleven-year-old daughter, with her bushy hair and mature brown eyes content to be left to themselves.

_It's a wonderful thing to have friends_, had read one of her letters midway through her first year away. The words sparkled with realization and wonder that had lifted the cloud of naivety of her own conception. That, in itself, was a beautiful thing. Her eyes sparkled the same way the next time he saw her, grown a half inch taller, her hair longer and bushier, her hands waving an enthusiastic goodbye to two boys just leaving the station platform. Both smiled back at her.

According to her, they had saved her from a mountain troll. He honestly didn't know how much of it he wanted to hear, so he focused instead on the fact that she was alive, and born to be different, but with a purpose; born to a place and time that could hold her.

He could nearly hear the stars moving in their charted courses, unseen and outshined momentarily by the brilliance of the sun. Though he had never been a man who believed in fate, he asked her on the way home if she studied Astrology at this new school of hers.

"Wizards don't believe in Astrology, dad," she informed him with a smile. "I do study Astronomy, and perhaps in third year I'll take Divination, which is more along the lines of Astrology. It all seems like a bunch of rubbish to me, from what I've heard, though."

So she chattered. It was lovely to hear again.

When third year did come, he was positively amazed to hear that she was taking a Muggle Studies course.

"But sweetheart, isn't 'Muggle' what they call us common folk?"

"Well, yes."

"Then by definition, aren't you a Muggle yourself?"

She'd looked at him oddly, her brow furrowed. "I'm Muggle-born, yes. But I'm technically a witch."

Ah, and there it had been, laid out for him. A gradual, unconscious dissociation, in all its saddened, unknown glory.

The next summer, she came home with scratches across her face she could have blamed on her new cat (which was rather ugly, if he did say so), but chose not to. For four hours she spun a fairy tale, fantastical as the shallow reality of who and what she now was. The struggle between good and evil; soul-sucking villains; the zenith of evil realized in one man, who was no longer a man, but something less human and alive. Mad murderers turned good; sinister plots and people reaching close, too close to her.

"He hates Muggles," she'd explained the year before. "He hates Muggle-borns, by extension, as to his way of thinking, they are a bastardization of what it means to be a true witch or wizard. He's a modern-day Hitler, dad."

Her safety hung in the air heavily with all she'd left unsaid, threatening to fall with the proverbial falling sky. Targeted twice over, once for her birth and once for her allegiance, she'd stood defiantly before him, brown eyes resigned, but not alone.

_It's a wonderful thing to have friends_, his daughter's voice echoed back to him the summer after that. He closed his eyes when they finally reached the house that for once, did not seem to welcome his daughter with open arms. A week later, he caught her staring blankly at the microwave, a bag of popcorn already inside. He wondered briefly, startled, if she'd forgotten how to use it; but she started at his footsteps and quickly pushed correct the buttons.

It hummed its detachment. She walked away.

_...worried about Harry... Cedric's death... Voldemort... angry... death... still on the rise. He's randomly torturing... Muggle settlements near Oxfordshire... Fudge won't acknowledge anything. Dad reckons he's finally lost it. _

He caught vague snippets of her letters, only occasionally, and she rustled them back up and put on a bright smile.

She was a part of a conspiracy of her own. Letters came and went, and never stopped. Her eyes dropped, always tired. She left, as she often did, before summer was over with not word of truth as to why. Concordia; Harmonia. Always secreted and spirited away; the child of love and war; an object of shame and pride.

The soothsayer had spoken. Hermione left; once, twice.

This year, this summer, she barely spoke. Once and a while she would double over, hand clutching her chest, her heart, her lungs, and rising again. Born into power, intelligence; born for a purpose. Hell had risen against her for her defiance. Harmonia lived, immortal, cursed.

She screamed her first night home, and at her parents rushing into her room, had explained nothing. Every night after that, she could be found in the living room, small and wrapped in a quilt, the television on and muted, her eyes open and glassy.

He had taken to sitting up with her. Every once and a while she would fall asleep; every now and then, her chest would seize up, and she couldn't breathe. She might gasp out names or places or spells that were inaudible, taken in on the inhale of air that could not reach her lungs.

The first time he had woken her, she had only whispered "He's back." She was inexplicable in her vagueness, intent, and meaning. Her eyes had been a sight he thought he never wanted to see again. Power coursed through them, intensifying fear and desperation. He looked away.

She never elaborated after that incident, nor was he entirely sure he wanted her to. There could only be so many things those words, that look, could mean.

_It's a wonderful thing to have friends._

Her eyes, haunted, reflected back the empty images that flashed meaninglessly over her where she sat unmoving, and for the moment, alone. Something had happened again, this year; he could feel it; to her and her friends. Eris rose against her in the form of her friends; a polar opposite to her nature; and her other half, introverted. Friendship had brought a war she was obligated to fight. He watched it begin to consume her.

The stars moved above them. Somewhere a skull glowed a sickening green, hovering listlessly in the night sky. Hermione did not sleep.

* * *

_**Hermione**__ – I. The daughter of Menelaus and Helen of Sparta (later of Troy); sent to be raised by her mother's sister Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon and queen of Mycenae, during the Trojan war._

_**Hermione**__ – II. In Shakespeare's _A Winter's Tale_, loving wife, mother, and queen of Bohemia. Her fate is open to two interpretations: either she died of grief at a trial ordered by her jealous once-loving husband, and sixteen years later, was ressurected; or more likely, was hidden away for sixteen years by her loyal lady-in-waiting. At her trial, an oracle affirmed her innocence; though her husband would not believe. _

_**Harmonia**__ (also, Hermione) – the Greek goddess of concord, friendship, and love in a non-romantic sense; and one who brought resolution to disputes and arguments. (In Roman terms, _Concordia._ Her Greek opposite is _Eris_; her Roman opposite _Discordia.) _The love-child of Aphrodite and Ares, she was spirited away by her mother to live with Queen Electra. At her wedding, the vengeful husband of Aphrodite, Hephaestus, presented Harmonia with a necklace that doomed her and her descendents to bad luck, and even death. (ie, Jocasta, mother and wife of Oedipus.)_


End file.
